Top 200 Agile Blogs

[If you’re not on this list and would like to be considered, post your blog information in a comment at the bottom!]

There are hundreds of great Agile blogs and software development blogs to read, but do you ever wonder which Agile blogs everyone else is reading? Ever wonder which ones are worth reading?

I do. I burn about 1400+ RSS feeds of Agile and software development blogs (growing weekly) with people emailing me monthly for my RSS XML file.

Here are the best 200 Agile blogs out there for 2011. Some focus exclusively on Agile and coaching, while others are more on leadership, news, consulting, Product Ownership, ScrumMastering, and specific Agile methods. Regardless of how you label them, these are the world’s most popular Agile blogs written by many of today’s most influential Agile leaders, practitioners, coaches, consultants, and hippies.

Want to brag about your rank or give some link love to the Top 200 Agile Blogs list? Embed the badge at the bottom of this page on your website.

For a legend and to understand how the rankings are computed, scroll down past the list.

Total Composite Rank
The calculated rank of the Agile blog sorted in ascending order.

Blog Name and URL
The <Title> name and URL.

Twitter Handle and URL
The Twitter.com name and corresponding URL. Often the Twitter name is often the same as the Author’s name (*Author’s Name not shown in interest of space). If I could not find a Twitter Name for the corresponding blog, then you’ll find “MakeATwitter” as a placeholder.

Alexa Rank
Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users and data collected from other, diverse sources over a rolling 3 month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and pageviews. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day.

Compete Visitors
The number of unique visitors that visited the website in June 2011 according to Compete.

Google PageRank
PageRank reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that Google believes are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

Google Reader Subscribers
The number of Google Reader users that subscribe to each blog. Note: this is not total RSS subscribers but rather how many Google Reader users subscribe to each blog.

Yahoo Inlinks
The number of links going to a blog’s entire site but excluding all self-linking links.

Klout Score
The Klout score is the measurement of ones overall online influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score (*Klout Score not shown in interest of space).

Power 150The Power 150 was developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik for the top marketing blogs in the world. It uses a basic multimetric algorithm to obtain a final ranking based on the sum of eight sources, seven of which come from Alexa, Yahoo, PostRank and Collective Intellect. The last is Todd’s own personal subjective measure. For the purposes of this list I utilized some of the partial concepts of Todd’s Power 150 (*Power 150 algorithm not shown).

HOW THE LIST IS COMPUTED

864 blogs were reviewed in a preliminary screening to determine if their statistics are competitive enough to be ranked.

For each of the 7 measured criteria, each blog is ranked in comparison to all other blogs being evaluated.

A composite rank for each blog is determined by averaging each blogs ranking from the 7 measured criteria + partial Power 150 Weighting + social media influence mapping.

The top 200 blogs are published.

ON ALEXA AND COMPETE

Do a quick Google search for “Alexa is wrong” or “Compete score unreliable” or any similar string. Yes, I am very aware of the inaccuracies of these two sites and have personally researched them. Some would say that the statistics from these sites are worthless, and I anticipate many emails about these two scores. My take on utilizing these scores are as follows:

If the scores are consistently inaccurate, then the hope is that they are inaccurate across the board for all sites.

Regardless of whether the scores are unreliable or not, individual users cannot “game” the system.

To create an objective weighting of scores for this list, commonly understood “standards” needed to be used (though these scores are weighted less than the Google PR rank, for example).

I personally do not give any credence to Alexa and Compete scores as definitive for business decisions. My suggestion to all would be to use Alexa and Compete in tandem with other systems to balance out any statistics for measuring interweb value.

ON KLOUT AND SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCE

The rise of social media can easily be seen as the current or next advertising and marketing medium to reach the masses. I am a firm believer that as social media influence tools are built out, it will be easier to see how to utilize social media as a “selling tool.” The following are the reasons why I added social media weights:

Social media is growing. It’s foolish for any business or personal brand not to be engaged in it.

“Reach” is a term that indicates true influence or position. Email campaigns and RSS (as some consider RSS a dying medium), is not enough. To expose your message to the world, your reach has to be as long as it can.

Social media tools are helping us understand the importance of crowd sourcing, user generated content, search engine optimization (SEO), and search engine marketing (SEM). If tooling is any indication of technology trends, then you absolutely have to keep your eye on their value.

I personally believe in the power of social media. I consult with many companies on how to further their engagement and have seen the pragmatic value and power of it. Many people often ask me what my favorite tools are, see below:

I have to say, I liked this list for so many reasons. One, you used an algorithm. You didn’t just say “Hey, I like this person so I’ll put them on the list.” Second, you used multiple grading criteria. Third, I can link directly to Twitter accounts or Blogs.

As you requested, Peter, here I am commenting. I maintain two agile-related blogs: jbrains.ca and blog.thecodewhisperer.com. Thanks for responding to my tweet, and thank you for promoting the agile community.

***DUE TO THE MASSIVE AMOUNT OF EMAILS I HAVE BEEN RECEIVING ABOUT THIS POST:

1. I believe I may have the most comprehensive (total) list of blogs on Agile… BUT
2. That doesn’t mean I have YOURS (I’m only one man after all).
3. If I missed yours and you believe you made the cut, please post a comment on this blog about your blog and any other info if possible.
4. I’ll re-run the algorithm in due time. This list is a comprehensive list but fair. I’ll keep it updated and run the list as much as I can (It’s a lot of work btw).
5. Please follow me @agilescout to stay up-to-date on updates on the list

Lastly, if you DM me or email me with things like: “Your list is stupid,” or “Your algorithm sucks.”
1. Thank you for reading my blog.
2. Please blog more to help the Agile community
3. Thank you for reading my blog.

Thanks for being so open about updating this list. I know how hard it is to judge people as “in” or “out”, no matter how objective or subjective the criteria. I helped choose the Gordon Pask Award winners for a few years, and while I enjoyed it, the community beat me up quite a lot for it.

I really wanted to know how to submit myself for consideration without coming off as a whiner. Thanks for not seeing it that way. 🙂

Great list! I blog at http://pagilista.blogspot.com (“Pragmatic Agilist: Non-zealot reflections on real life agile leadership, management and analysis practices.” Thanks for doing this compilation, and especially for the one on top women bloggers.

Please add my blog http://www.agilethoughts.dk to the list too… I’m pretty sure I’ll not make the cut this time around, but hope to do it in the future. Will you watch how thinks develop or will I have to pitch my blog again in the future?

Although I hardly use the word agile in my postings I do write a lot about the subject disguised as general software development and – lately – software design. I guess that’s mainly because agile should be more common sense and is a means to an end to produce working software 😉

While i can completely understand what you might have gone through not just preparing the list but with all the lovely emails that you would have/are receiving ;), can i request you to please add our agile blog to your database. I ll assume we ll be on top spot for next revision ;).

Hi Peter – as discussed, http://www.scrumshortcuts.com/blog is my blog that has now been picked up by Mike Cohn and is being converted into a book forthe Addison-Wesley, Cohn Signature Series! The blog is barely a year old but has been getting really good traction. I hope it will be considered for the 2012 list and keep up the great work!

My “agile” blog is not in the top list. It’s obious for some reasons:
1) It’s is in italian and not in english.
2) It’s more philosophical than technical. I talk about the “agility” of some people (or literary characters) that are not related to software developement. But
1) I read the english translation of google and I change my post until the google english translation is good enough.
2) I think that it could be interesting, expecially in a country like Italy that had a long history of “agility” in every day culture, but when the upper class and ruling class seems to need to forget its culture and likes heavy bureaucracy, correct the effects without considering the causes, discouraging people …

I’m not blogging on Scrumcoaching.wordpress.com anymore, I have moved to http://www.growingagile.co.za/blog
Would love it if you could include my new blog instead of my old blog when you next update this list.

The ideal method of team building
I have written a lot about building flexible Agile teams and their usual shortcomings. However, there is a river of information behind it and improving our knowledge of building patch-functional teams is worthwhile. This type of team has all the skills that are needed, so that we can provide the customer with potentially ready to deliver functionality every time. A team like this usually does not need any outside help. But for us, as software developers, what does a patch-functional team really mean? What exact skills do we need?

This article will provide readers with an introduction to the statistical and dynamic analysis of code. However, before proceeding to analysis, we must first understand the concept of agile methodologies for code development. To begin, we’ll start with an exploration of agile/scrum methodology and how it plays into the paradigm of extreme programming.

Thank you for the job, we in Russia are still at the start of the “agilising” process. So that’s a great help to us to have a quick overview of those writing about this. As a thank, I’ll add my penny, here is another blog, though not dedicated fully to Agile, but to the backup industry, but anyway can be of interest, I hope: https://www.baculasystems.com/blog/helping-you-to-be-agile-part-1

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